Baby boomers were the last generation to be drafted. Generation X and Millennials are now too old to be drafted. I have a young Zoomer friend who is too disabled to be of use to a modern military, but he still had to register at the Selective Service website just so he could be eligible for a driver's license. A very minor inconvenience to be sure, but let's go ahead and have this conversation about forcing future generations to fight for dubious causes.
Usually when I have this debate online, some pro-draft advocate will talk about intangibles like instilling national pride. Nobody born after 1955 has been drafted into the US military, and yet we find reasons to be proud. They might unironically advocate drafting “everyone, no exceptions”, and I’ll ask if they intend to provide felons, mental patients, and the Amish with weapons and training. Then they’ll talk about mandatory civil service as an alternative to the draft. In their eyes, national pride outweighs the 13th Amendment.
The Supreme Court is being asked again to rule on whether or not it’s constitutional to require only men to register for the draft. Some MRA’s and some feminists agree that if men have to fill out the Selective Service form, then women should be required to as well. But If this country lacks the political will to abolish Selective Service, reforming the obsolete institution serves no purpose either. I wish I was excluded from the draft myself. It would have been one less form for me to fill out, and one less thing to worry about. Life is unfair to men and women in different ways, but on the whole life is more unfair to women. Adding this extra burden to young women is an insult at best. To their credit, women have been more inclined to protest wars than to fight in wars. If women are subjected to the draft, many states would force them to either register for Selective Service, or forfeit their driver's license. Even in the absence of an actual war or an actual draft, this can impact their quality of life if they follow their conscience and refuse to register. There are many men who are suffering consequences for failure to register right now, and extending the draft to women would likely more than double the number of people who experience these hardships.
You can't even claim that there is a compelling state interest for Selective Service. In this age of drones, cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons, no foreign country wants to attack the US. Foreign terror groups are still out there, but they are never able to muster up more than a few volunteers to die for their cause. As of this writing, the chief security threat to the US is domestic terror groups and domestic insurrection. Our top notch military wants only the best men and women to serve. People who lack the will to serve voluntarily won't perform as well.
Right now, the Pentagon is trying to screen out right-wing extremists from it's own ranks. A draft would risk drawing in more of the extremists that the military is trying to get rid of. There are policies are in place to keep neo-Nazis and other fashholes from enlisting, so it might make sense to make them ineligible for the draft. Except that a draft might boost the recruitment numbers of these hate groups: just get a teardrop tattoo and you get to stay home while all your liberal peers have to go through boot camp.
In fact, the first time the draft was employed on a national scale was during the Civil War. The Confederacy tried it first. Slaveowners themselves were exempt from the draft, and poor white men were justifiable resentful of being forced to fight for the "right" of wealthy men to own slaves. The Union attempted their own draft, and this led to the New York Draft Riots. Union troops had to be pulled from the front to restore order. The Confederacy lost the war anyway, and the Union suffered a net loss in manpower as a result of the draft.
So in terms of promoting military readiness, these are solid reasons NOT to use a draft. But some antiwar activists WANT a draft because it boosts opposition to wars. Never mind that the war in Vietnam dragged on for years with a draft in place. We can hope to avoid stupid wars in the future, but the draft makes war worse. Historically, conscripts suffered higher casualty rates than volunteers. All the draft did for Vietnam was add more names to the big black wall that was built after the war.
The draft is useless and potentially dangerous. The only reason it’s still around is nostalgia. There is a bipartisan bill to end the Selective Service requirement for everybody. This bill should be passed so we can move on and talk about more important things during the midterms.